


the city where you live now

by misandrywitch



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Car repairs, Missing Scene, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, and kissing, the Alex Manes overthinking express train to hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 06:40:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20484518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: There’s probably a danger, Alex thinks, in feeling this way about someone who looks at him like he’s a five-alarm fire. Alex is in danger of catching alight. He doesn’t think he cares.





	the city where you live now

**Author's Note:**

> a missing scene fairly early in the show; somewhere after 1x02 but before things really blow up between the two of them. they definitely had sex more than once. 
> 
> i wanted to write about what vulnerability might look like for these two characters. but i also wanted to write about logistics, and alex's disability, and how sex changes with pain and explanations. my m.o. is making characters do a funky little tap-dance & think about their trauma. 
> 
> title is from the poem "I Have Not Come Here to Compare Notes But to Sit Together in the Stillness at the Edge of This Wound" by david kirby.

  


  


“It’s the handbrake,” Alex says. “I think.” 

He stares into the dust between the SUV’s wheels and Michael’s boots, which is easier than watching Michael’s face. Michael is staring into the car’s interior anyway, not looking Alex’s way. Alex can tell from the angle of his shoulders. 

“Huh,” Michael says, muffled as he leans through the open front door. “It’s connected to the brakes underneath?”

“Yeah,” Alex confirms. One of Michael’s legs pitches upwards as he leans further in the car, black boot pulling a cloud of dust with it. “It’s supposed to be easier to use. Because I can’t feel what I’m doing in the same way, now. But I’m not great at it yet. I thought maybe I was just doing something wrong but - I think it’s sticking.” 

“Yeah,” Michael rights himself. His hair is standing on end from the gravity of poking his head underneath the dashboard of Alex’s SUV. He wipes at his forehead with his wrist. “Sure looks like something’s loose. You’ve been driving around like this?” 

“I drove from where I’m staying to the base today,” Alex says. He’d surreptitiously changed out of the uniform before getting back in the offending vehicle and driving towards the junkyard and Michael’s trailer. By the time he’d gotten there the sun was going down; he’d expected - or hoped - that Michael would already be posted up in the bar or wherever else he spent his time. He’d been wrong. 

“Where are you staying?” 

“Forty five minutes outside town.” 

“Yikes,” Michael says, shaking his head. “I’ll take a look while we still got some daylight.” 

“I don’t mean - I know it’s late,” Alex says. Michael squats at his toolbox and starts rummaging, which does interesting things to the line of his shoulders under his grey t-shirt. “There is a mechanic, at Walker. You don’t have to but - “ he’s floundering - “of course, he installed the damn thing and I don’t think he knew what he was doing.”

“I don’t mind,” Michael stands, looks over at him, “if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Yeah,” Alex says. “You’re definitely a better mechanic, anyway.” 

“You haven’t even seen my work!” Michael flashes a grin.

“And you don’t know who I’m comparing you to.” Alex shrugs his hands into his pockets and watches Michael heft the toolbox onto one hip. “I’ll call someone - Liz, or someone - and get a ride back, I guess.” 

“Nah,” Michael’s attention lands on him, then moves towards the car. “I can do it now, no need to wait. The most interesting thing that’s come my way today. Unless you’re dying to get out of here.”

Alex is, in a way. He had almost turned back to the base when the brake had started sticking in earnest earlier that day. And then he’d jumped at the chance to take it to the junkyard for repairs, because that meant seeing Michael - which made him balk - which made him feel guilty. Phoning for a ride and leaving now means leaving that guilt to be examined another day, rather than sitting with it as he watches Michael tinker with the inside of the car.

But it also means leaving Michael alone to tinker with the inside of the car. Alex isn’t an idiot. But he thinks he deserves a few moments to be selfish, every now and then. 

“I’ll wait,” he says, “if you’ve got beer in that trailer, anyway.” 

“Get me a cold one,” Michael waves a hand over his shoulder, already busy. So Alex heads up the steps to Michael’s trailer by himself. 

Out on the ranch land, the battered Airstream had looked like it was settled there, comfortable in the landscape. It looks like it’s been dragged into the junkyard and dropped without much thought. 

Alex has been in it before, of course. Had let himself in, a rare moment of clarity and boldness in the chaos he’s been engulfed in. Michael had spit out a confession and Alex had decided with those words that he wouldn’t look away either. At least for a moment. So he’d pushed past Michael and opened the door to the trailer like he belonged there, and kissed Michael like he deserved it, and felt the floor of the last ten years fall away just for a moment. 

Thirteen months and counting.

Thirteen months - and he’s felt like a shadow of himself with moments in the spotlight of old, remembered emotion. Liz and Maria looping him in for an embrace on the floor of the Wild Pony - a flicker there. Seeing how the key he’d received alongside a letter from Jim Valenti, now dead, had fit the lock of the back-road cabin outside of town - a murmur. And Michael - looking at him across the back hall of a high school gymnasium with those eyes that hadn’t changed at all, that Alex hadn’t ever had time to get tired of looking into. 

Alex shakes that thought away because it hurts. The distance hurts, and so does Michael’s prickly irritation and his assumptions about why that distance has to exist at all. He doesn’t look around the trailer much because the details feel like they don’t belong to him. The beer’s in the minifridge, and that’s easy and neutral. He opens them with his belt buckle and leaves the trailer.

“Thanks,” Michael says. He accepts it without looking, one arm underneath the dashboard. “This is fucked right up a creek without a paddle. How were you driving this thing?”

“Dumb luck?” Alex sits on one of the lawnchairs grouped haphazardly outside the trailer. Three of them. He wonders who comes to visit, that Michael has set lawnchairs out and left them there. He sips his beer. The sun is growing lower in the sky. 

“Won’t be long,” Michael says. Something clanks promisingly inside the car. “Then you can be on your way.”

Alex should, yes, be on his way. The things hanging above his head are a cloud. His work, or what passes for it. His recovery, or what passes for that. His father - what passes for that. And the secret embedded in an iridescent slice of glass. Alex is trying to follow the trail. It’s something he’s good at. And he can’t escape the thought that he’s racing the clock to find an answer that isn’t a dead end or a confrontation.

He sips his beer. 

“Not really, no,” he says, and Michael turns to look at him again.

“Didn’t realize this was a social occasion,” he says. “Haven’t seen you around, since - “

Since Alex had drawn a metaphorical line in the sand. “I’ve been around,” he says. “Playing about ten years of catchup with Maria, mostly. And I am working, you know. At least for a few more months.”

“Ah, right,” Michael nods, turning back towards the car. “At the base. Stealing land from farmers?”

“Pushing pencils, mostly. I’m on what’s politely described as desk duty.” Pushing pencils when he’s not chasing rabbits down conspiracy theory holes. 

“Because of your leg?” Perhaps the first time Michael has acknowledged it outright, Alex thinks. He shifts his right foot in the dust. For once, that’s not even the half of it. It’s more to do with his psychological profile. And some unseen machinations on his father’s end - bringing him back here. He doesn’t understand it. 

“Something like that,” he says, instead. “I’m not surprised you’re good at it, for the record.” Michael starts in on something that Alex knows will come out of his mouth in innuendo. “Working on cars,” Alex continues. “You were always good at fixing things. You know, getting my guitar to stay in tune.” 

“I’m alright,” Michael says. “It’s a living. Kind of. Everyone needs their car fixed. More useful than getting shot at.”

“Mostly I sat behind mobile laptop units and typed really fast,” Alex says. It’s not patently a lie. The mobile computer units just happened to be in the line of fire, sometimes. 

“Clearly not all the time.”

“No, not all the time.”

There’s a final clunking sound from inside the car, and Michael rights himself the rest of the way and shuts the door. “That should do it,” he says. “Bring it by again if you have any more trouble, though.” 

“I think it knows I resent it,” Alex says. 

“They can tell.”

Michael wipes sweat off his forehead with his wrist again and picks up his beer and then collapses with boneless elegance into the lawnchair. Michael at eighteen had been uncoordinated and gangly, big hands and untidy curls and a wide-eyed earnestness that hadn’t always meshed with his smart mouth. Alex at eighteen had just been braced for the defense, ready to head off an argument first so he could have some control over it. 

He runs his thumb over the underside of his nose which is an old, old habit that left with a piercing he’d taken out ages ago. He would flip it up and then down again, a nervous tick. 

“You want another one?” Michael gestures at Alex’s mostly empty beer. “Unless you got a hot date waiting for you?” 

Alex snorts. “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I assume you’re talking about Liz Ortecho.” 

Michael pulls a face. “That might be better. Maybe Max would shut the hell up.” He takes Alex’s beer bottle. Their fingers don’t touch. “She knows you’re gay, right?”

“I’ve mentioned it,” Alex calls over his shoulder. “Once or twice.” After the first, terrible time he’d said it out loud, Alex had wanted to say it until his mouth got tired of forming the words. He hadn’t, outside of Liz and Maria’s company. But he wanted to.

The rumors had spread anyway, and it seems like his dad known before Alex himself thought to take the words and make them his own. Sometimes he wonders what exactly he was so careful about, and why he didn’t spend his time shouting it down hallways. Forcing everyone around him to confront the truth. He was going to get it either way; he should have enjoyed it a little. 

Even now, there’s a secret thrill in Michael saying it out loud like that, casual and unconcerned. He hadn’t waved it around like a flag overseas but there are people he told, the ones he likes and trusts. An unacknowledged truth more than an open secret and Alex had never stopped being afraid of consequence, exactly, but he’d gathered data to prove to himself the fallout isn’t always bad. 

It’s something in Roswell’s air, his father’s looming presence. It breeds paranoia. 

A paranoia that might be justified, to be fair. 

He should get back to the cabin, keep chasing the plot through tangled conspiracies and bullshit. It’s an angle of leverage. One Alex never thought he’d be handed. 

“Thanks,” he says instead, when Michael returns with another beer bottle. Michael looks at him over his shoulder, something appraising; in what way, Alex isn’t sure.

“So,” Michael swallows beer. It’s something stronger than Alex would buy himself; he usually caps that kind of purchase at five percent, or soda water and a lot of ice, because he’s aware in a vague way of worries like _ coping mechanisms. _“You’ve caught on to the Maxwell-and-Liz parade, then? It’s a real constipator.” 

“How do you mean?” 

“Disturbing my shit.” Michael scowls like an angry toddler. It makes Alex laugh. 

“I guess I remember them being friends in high school,” he says. The beer is going to his head a little; talking about high school feels like a field of landmines but he wants to chance it. “But I guess I assumed Max - sorry, Deputy Evans - was just mooning after Liz. Boys always were.” 

“Not me,” Michael scoffs. “And not you.” 

Mostly, Alex had wanted Liz’s sister to lend him CDs. That’s mooning in its own way. 

“He was hung up on her though,” Michael continues, shaking his head. “Never shut up about it.” There’s an edge to his words that Alex can’t quite follow. He doesn’t try. Old history somewhere between Michael and Max Evans, something Alex never understood then and certainly can’t guess at now. 

“I’m surprised she’s in Roswell at all, honestly,” Alex says. “Maybe not that surprised, but - a little.” 

“What, you didn’t keep in touch?”

That’s the mine. Alex can’t tell if it’s a dud, or waiting to go off. He steps on it anyway. What's one more foot when you've done it once? “Not really. I don’t think Liz kept up with anyone from home except for her dad. And I did a half-assed job of talking to Maria and her mother twice a year. Jim Valenti too, I guess. Before he died.” 

Michael chews his lower lip for a second. Alex waits for the fallout. 

“Too busy being shot at to write?”

“Guess so.” 

“Didn’t really help much,” Michael points with the beer bottle towards Alex’s leg.

“You’re a dick,” Alex says cheerfully. He feels boneless and embraces that, tips his head over the back of the lawnchair to look skyward. It’s a cloudy dusk, purple-tinged. “Some things haven’t changed at all. Like that.”

“Yeah. Some things.” 

Alex looks up again. Michael is leaning forward in the lawn chair with his elbows on both knees. Watching him. 

“Arturo’s _chilaquiles_ are as good as they ever were. Nobody makes real green chili like his in Mosul,” Alex says. “And they play the same shit on the jukebox in the diner.” 

“His cooking’s the best in the state. He wins awards.” 

“I don’t think the prices in the Wild Pony have changed at all either,” Alex continues. “I mean, not that I paid for drinks there when I was seventeen - “

“Naughty,” Michael says, grinning. “Little delinquent? You?” 

“And the sunsets are the same as they were,” Alex says. “Which is to say they’re always different.” 

“I’ve never seen two the same.” 

The sky above them is turning from purple to navy. 

“You’re not supposed to be able to go home again.” Alex watches the clouds disappear into the dusk rather than look at Michael. “That’s what I told myself. And it’s not the same. Eight new car dealerships? A whole new wing on the contemporary art museum? And nowhere in this town is handicapped accessible, by the way. But - everything’s always different when you come back to it after a long time.” 

Including me, Alex thinks. Mostly me. When he looks back at Michael, he’s staring into the unlit fire pit between them. Alex watches his eyes raise again, his fair eyelashes dropping dusk-cast shadows on his face. 

“You don’t think that’s a bad thing?” 

“Not always.”

Alex meets Michael’s eyes. That hasn’t changed at all. Alex has never forgotten what it feels like to be looked at and understood. Every time it’s happened to him since, Alex compares it to Michael watching him; over the frets of his guitar, the bed of his truck, the space of a picnic table behind the high school at lunch, the space of a whisper. You never forget your first time. 

It makes the next decision he makes easy. Easy like breathing, people say - people who have never lived through something that made breathing hurt. Alex has. And this hurts too, but he doesn’t mind it. It’s a reminder that it’s really happening. 

Alex stands up. 

Michael looks up at him. 

The trick is deciding what kind of pain you can live with, where that line is. Alex has a lifetime of experience. 

When Alex moved forward, Michael comes to meet him. That’s a relief but it hurts, too. 

Alex kisses him first, but barely. 

There’s nothing particularly graceful about it. Michael leads Alex backwards with his palms on Alex’s arms and they stop to navigate the steps of the trailer. Alex drops his crutch, and Michael kicks it out of the way. When Alex presses him against the door, Michael fights with the doorhandle until it slams closed on Alex’s prosthetic foot. It makes a jarring metallic sound; they jump, Michael laughs so Alex laughs. 

“Should’ve warned me you got turned into the Terminator,” Michael says against Alex’s jaw. His day-old beard is rough against Alex’s neck. 

“Excuse you,” Alex says. “I didn’t live through three combat tours for that to fall anywhere short of Bucky Barnes.”

“My bad,” Michael’s mouth is on his earlobe, his fingers fighting with the buttons on Alex’s jacket. Alex does the work for him and pushes Michael’s collar aside to get his fingers on Michael’s pulse. He’s drowning in the details; the calluses of Michael’s fingers against his collarbone as he undoes buttons, his hair in between Alex’s fingers, his thigh in between Alex’s knees and his mouth on Alex’s mouth. 

It’s happening too fast. It always does, desperation sliding out of Alex’s fingers before he can catch it. He’s surprised that he doesn’t want it to. 

“Wait, hold on,” Alex pulls away even as Michael pulls closer, puts a palm against Michael’s chest for a breath. Michael blinks, his face already closing into something harder. A deflection, and he doesn’t even know what Alex is going to say. Alex always remembered him being so open when they were young, though nobody else seemed to think about Michael that way. Nobody else seemed to think about him much at all. 

“Getting cold feet, private?” Michael drawls. It eats up his words like a cloak. 

“I’m not in the Army,” Alex snaps, then sighs. He presses his palm against Michael’s collarbone, his thumb touching the hollow of his throat. “We don’t have to do this like we’re running a race.”

Michael stares at him. Alex is aware suddenly of what he’s asking. It’s a request to slow down and acknowledge what this is - something that doesn’t begin and end with their hands on each other. He thinks that’s easier for Michael, the language he’s gotten used to using. Alex himself is good at speaking in code. 

“I don’t have cold feet,” Alex continues. “I’ve got one fake one. In case you’ve forgotten.” 

“Right,” Michael’s eyes flicker past Alex’s waistline - unbuttoned - to his leg. “I didn’t think. Not gonna drop off, is it?”

“It’s not exactly comfortable.” 

Alex lets himself pull away a little farther, aware of his Michael’s eyes follow him. He’s aware, suddenly, that Michael believes if Alex puts the brakes on this then he’ll turn away for good. 

So he doesn’t. 

He steps sideways and sits on the trailer’s bed. It feels like crossing a line into Michael’s space without a reason to though of course - Alex feels almost hysterical as he thinks this - of course there is a reason. There always is a reason. 

The first time they’d fallen into bed together - the first time in years - it had happened too fast for Alex to allow for self-consciousness. That fear had been overtaken by want, by the need to be as close to Michael as possible, as fast as possible. To the warm, physical truth of him. Alex wanted to map out what he remembered, what he didn’t. He hadn’t stopped to consider how he might explain, or issue a warning. 

The truth of the last thirteen months - of the last ten years - is written on to his body. It can’t be escaped or ignored.

But Michael hadn’t asked. 

Now, though, there isn’t anything immediate to escape into. Alex leans into that. It’s supposed to be good for him. He’s aware that, with the prosthetic and an unflattering pair of jeans, the loss of his leg isn’t immediately obvious. He also knows that everyone in Roswell has probably heard the story - at least the version of it told at the damn parade they’d thrown in his honor while he’s stood on the bandstand and sweated, itchy and uncomfortable. But until somebody has to confront the physical reality of the thing, it’s Schrodinger's War Wound; present enough for the passing comments on his service, but not real enough to make anybody uncomfortable. Other than him, anyway. 

Alex unties his shoes, removes his socks even though he thinks the metal-and-plastic foot looks weird without one. He’s methodical about it. Michael, still standing, watches him. Alex stands so he can pull his jeans down over his thighs, then his calves. He unlocks the pin in the prosthetic, loosens it, slides it off. Pushes it aside. He feels lopsided without it, but lighter. 

The leg is a tool, not a disguise. Alex is trying to think about it that way, rather than the result of a staring contest.

“Let me see it,” Michael says suddenly. Alex thinks for a moment he means the scar - but Michael reaches over him to grab the leg itself. He sits down, turning it over in his hands. “It’s lighter than I thought it’d be,” he says. 

“Carbon fiber,” Alex says, watching his hands. Michael turns it around again, moves the ankle joint. “The weight’s tricky. Your two legs are about forty percent of your total body weight but it’s a different issue when you’re carting around something that’s not attached to you.” 

“It’s clever.” Michael has the kind of eyes that pick out problems. Alex doesn’t want to know what he sees, when he turns them his way. “You have to worry about overdoing it? Compensating too much on the other side?” 

“I’m not an engine block,” Alex says. Michael looks up at him, almost offended. “But you’re not too far off. I’m supposed to put pressure up in my hip, rather than my knee joint. But anything faster than a leisurely stroll and my other knee just hurts instead. Any excuse to skip jogging, right?” Alex clears his throat, reaching for a moment of bravado. “You want to give my prosthetist a call and chat about it, or come over here?”

Michael’s eyes flicker up to Alex’s face. He sets the prosthetic down. “I know that it’s not like fixing an engine,” he says, and Alex snorts. “Didn’t mean that. Guess I hadn’t thought about it. Figuring out how to walk. I mean, you had to. Right? But you showed up back here upright, more or less.”

“More or less,” Alex echoes. In a manner of speaking.

“If I didn’t think about it I could almost forget,” Michael says softly.

“Sorry to ruin the illusion,” Alex says, and he turns his face to stare at the wall of the trailer. 

Michael reaches out, which surprises him, and catches Alex by the chin. Vaguely, Alex recognizes it’s Michael’s bad hand - thumb and forefinger on the edge of that scar tissue. 

“That’s not what I meant either,” Michael says. There’s a line in between his eyebrows that hadn’t been there as a teenager. 

“I know.” 

Michael touches Alex’s bottom lip with his thumb. 

“Guess I - “ Michael swallows. “I didn’t think you’d ever come back here.” 

There’s a difference between knowing something, and seeing it for yourself. Alex knows this well. Seeing Michael’s face for the first time in ten years had been like that. The sun had been beating down, reflecting off the hot metal of the trailer they’d found parked in the middle of the land the Air Force was negotiating the sale of. Alex had been peering in dusty windows, turned at the sound of footsteps behind him - 

And there was that face. Older, different, changed the way ten years changes anybody. Curls windswept and dusty, the way everything in Roswell was windswept and dusty. But those eyes. Michael had looked at him, and Alex had fallen through time and space back through his own history and he was staring, awestruck and unsure, at those eyes across the bed of a pickup truck for the first time. 

“I guess I always knew I would, someday,” Alex says. The ridge of Michael’s thumbnail is hard against his teeth. “I was never gonna escape it entirely. But I thought you’d be long gone.” 

“Yeah,” Michael’s laugh is a little bitter at the edges. “But here I am.” 

“Here you are,” Alex says. 

And here I am. Should that be enough to mean something? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. 

He closes the space between them the way he looks back across the arc of ten years. And when he kisses Michael, he can tell that Michael is holding his breath. 

He’s holding back and that’s unlike Michael, so animated and brave in Alex’s memory as a teenaged kid, so tenacious and wild as a man. But he lets Alex set the pace, his hand warm on Alex’s thigh. Alex kisses the corner of his mouth and the arc of his cheekbone. When he puts his mouth at the edge of Michael’s jaw he sees Michael’s eyelids flutter. He likes the cause and effect; he pulls Michael’s shirt off his shoulders and kisses his collarbone and Michael’s throat works; he runs a thumb over Michael’s Adam’s apple and the tendons in Michael’s arms tighten. And his tongue on Michael’s bottom lip is an invitation. 

When he lets it go Alex can feel that too. 

Michael moves forward and Alex leans back, leads and lets himself be led until he’s on his back and his field of vision is framed by Michael’s shoulders and that wild head of hair.

“You wanna tell me,” Michael says, and Alex feels his voice against his chest and stomach as much as he hears it, “if the malfunctioning brakes in your landwhale were a transparent excuse to drive over here?” 

“No,” Alex says. “You think I loosened my own brakes? I could have come up with something a little less life-threatening.” 

Michael catches the hairs at the back of Alex’s skull, tips his head back. “It’s just convenient,” he says. His words ghost across Alex’s neck, the suggestion of contact. 

“The damn things really weren’t working right. I am supposed to work on,” Alex swallows as Michael’s mouth moves across the line of his right shoulder, “utilizing other mobility aids so I put less strain on my knee and - “ Michael’s worked his way to Alex’s ribs, an almost-invisible pressure, “ - and give myself options so I don’t feel required to wear the prosthetic - “ Michael kisses his hip bone - “according to my physical therapist, anyway, Jesus, Michael - “ 

“Why are you talking about your physical therapist?” Michael looks up at him, all jawline and teeth. 

“I don’t know,” Alex says, blood pounding in his ears. He feels like a live wire, electrified and waiting for someone to throw a switch. Michael’s taken his comment about running a race like a challenge and Alex needs the contact like a lifeline. The rough hair on Michael’s jaw brushes Alex’s left knee, then his right. His fingers follow the line of the scar on his leg. It’s a point of momentary numbness; when Michael pushes his knees farther apart on the bed Alex gasps. Michael looks up at the sound. 

“Would your physical therapist,” his teeth scrape Alex’s hipbone, “have something to say about this?”

“Something about dexterity,” Alex manages, “and muscle memory, maybe - shut up - “

“If you insist,” Michael says, and then he lifts Alex’s hips and pulls his briefs down. 

Alex closes his eyes so he feels, rather than sees, Michael’s fingers, his mouth. The light under his eyelids is purple and red, a late-night desert sunset when the clouds refract dying color. When he opens his eyes again the fading light is in Michael’s hair too. Alex winds his fingers through it to feel Michael’s reaction. 

Michael presses one palm hard against Alex’s hip to hold him still and Alex can’t help but push against it, against Michael’s mouth. He’s dizzy with the contact and it’s not enough; his fingers follow the line of Michael’s skull and his jaw, his throat. His bottom lip. The corner of his mouth. That makes Michael’s breath stop and catch and for some reason that tips Alex towards the edge. He doesn’t want that yet. He tugs at Michael’s hair, pulls his head back and Michael pushes himself up on his elbows to look at him. He wipes his mouth. 

“Problem?” He asks. His bravado is lost because his voice is wrecked and unsteady. 

“Come here,” Alex says. 

Michael hauls himself back up the length of the bed. He kisses Alex’s temple. 

“Look at you,” he says. 

“I’m right here,” Alex says, which doesn’t make any sense. A return to a previous conversation. There's still too much space between them. He works at the button on Michael’s jeans, fingers tumbling over each other. They fight with them together and then Alex’s fingers find bare skin. Michael rocks into him, his mouth hot and open against Alex’s jaw. 

He does it without thinking. 

Michael’s left hand is braced against Alex’s shoulder, pulling them closer together and Alex wants the moment to stretch. His forefinger and thumb fit around Michael’s wrist. He presses his lips to the heel of Michael’s palm to feel his pulse. The rough line of scar tissue presses against his cheek. 

Michael stops moving. When Alex looks at him, his eyes are wide and shadowed. He had been hard and desperate; now he’s two seconds from pulling away. 

There’s a difference between knowing something and seeing it for yourself, Alex thinks. Someday, he’ll get that right. Right now, all he can do is hold on.

“It’s alright,” he hears himself say. “Michael. Look at me.” 

He kisses four battered knuckles, two that healed wrong if they healed at all. Four fingertips. Michael watches him; he puts Michael’s thumb to his lips, then in his mouth. 

“Always am,” Michael’s voice is a rasp. 

Alex doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t; action has always suited him better than words have. A sense of irony there, because Alex has never felt like he fits into his body, long before a buried IED tore part of it from him. It was always betraying him, expressing too much or too little. He’s come to trust it, a long journey, and he and the damage that lives in it now aren’t at war with each other so much as they’re united in a battle with everything else. It can’t do everything he wants it to. But - that’s always been true. 

He pushes himself onto his elbow, moves Michael’s hip with his own and gets his right knee over Michael’s waist. It’s not natural or elegant or easy. Alex does it anyway. 

“You sure you should - “ Michael’s face is a question. He catches at Alex's leg, his fingers on the scar. Alex finds he doesn't mind that. “You’re okay to - “

Alex thrusts against him as an answer. 

“Message received,” Michael gasps, his fingers digging into Alex’s hips now. “No complaints from me.” 

Alex leans back, his palm against Michael’s chest. “Just catch me if I lose my balance," he says. He lets Michael anchor him there; trusts him to hold him steady.

Michael watches him as Alex moves against him. Slowly, finding his balance through the tightness in his right hip. Michael lets him concentrate, the muscles in his stomach working to stay still. Alex finds his rhythm; Michael’s hips jerk into him. Alex tips his head back without worrying what he looks like. 

Michael doesn’t close his eyes while Alex fucks him. 

There’s probably a danger, Alex thinks, in feeling this way about someone who looks at him like he’s a five-alarm fire. Alex is in danger of catching alight. He doesn’t think he cares. 

That’s what he’s thinking when Michael surprises him. He sits up, still holding Alex’s hips so his thighs slide over Michael’s and they’re forehead-to-forehead, chest-to-chest. Momentarily unmoored, Alex moves wrong. 

Pain, white-hot and then cold and burning, flares from his hip through his knee. There’s an echo of it in places where there are no longer nerve endings to feel pain. Joints and tendons are still learning to move in new ways, and muscle memory is an old iron hand. He cries out before he can help it, pain and not pleasure, and grits his teeth. Turns his head, but there’s nowhere else to look to but Michael’s face or the far wall. 

“Fuck, sorry - “ Michael starts to pull away and Alex can’t let him. “Alex, I’m sorry - “ 

He catches him by the nape of his neck and presses their foreheads together. Makes himself swallow air and not panic, not shame. 

“Are you - “ 

“I’m fine,” he says, and he hopes it sounds firm and clear. He breathes out. “It’s alright.” 

Sometimes it seems like pain is all that Alex has that’s truly his own. It recedes slowly, like a warning. Michael’s hands are cradling his skull like he’s something fragile, or precious. 

Alex kisses him, to let him know he feels that. He arches his back, weight on his good leg and Michael shudders a gasp. His pupils are blown wide, eating up the brown of his eyes and is mouth is warm and open. 

He’s still kissing him when Alex comes. 

The sky outside the little window of the trailer is dark now, navy-black and overcast. No stars. They breathe together for a long moment before the angle hurts too badly for Alex to sit still. 

Michael lets him move first; it’s an awkward dance of knees over elbows and Alex lands on his hip while Michael shuffles out of his way. He can feel soreness creeping in already. He’ll pay for this tomorrow, but that feels fitting. 

“Guess that means we’re getting old,” Michael says, and then visibly winces like he’s uncertain how Alex will relax. His hair is everywhere, his chest flushed. Alex can feel the burn of his stubble under his own jaw and he knows he will for days. 

“Sorry I’ve lost the trick to fucking like we’re teenagers,” Alex says lightly. Michael’s eyes crinkle. 

“If you mean coming in your pants because we’re making out in the back of my truck,” he says, “I don’t miss it.”

“That was one time.”

The memory is suddenly vivid and real. Michael's hands and his eyes and the summer night sky, the thrill of having never done this before with anyone else. Of it being Michael with his knee between Alex's knee and his tongue between Alex's teeth. Alex had been electric with it, sticky and embarrassed afterward. They'd both laughed. 

“For you. I’m thinking about me. Definitely more than once.” 

Michael sits up on the edge of the bed. There’s a distance between them already that feels constructed and purposeful. 

“You’re gonna go, then?” He asks. He tugs a hand through his wild hair, tendons in his wrists working. “Gotta have somewhere better to be than here.” 

Alex knows he keeps establishing his own invisible boundaries between what’s safe and what is dangerous, and then hurtling over them. That requires work because he’s not much of a sprinter these days. 

He also knows that it’s not fair to Michael, who is always looking and who wants something that Alex is afraid to give. He doesn’t know who’s watching, and he can’t predict the outcome. His own pain is an old friend but Michael’s is unfathomable. He doesn’t think he can survive a repeat performance. 

If he could put words to that feeling, maybe then Michael could understand. Alex wants to get on his knees and beg for patience. With his luck, he’d just fall over. 

“Bad idea to drive all that distance in the dark,” he says, instead. “Unless you’re objecting.” 

“Don’t look at me.” Michael stands and stretches his arms above his head. Alex lets himself admire the muscles in his back; time has worked changes on Michael’s body too, scars Alex doesn’t recognize and strength that’s solid and real. “I’m opening a damn window.” 

The night air is cool and clean. Michael turns back around and Alex pulls himself up on one leg with a hand against the wall to steady himself. He kisses him, because there’s little else he can say. 

Someday, Alex thinks, he is going to be able to get this right. 

He doesn’t think he can do it, yet. 

**Author's Note:**

> the issue of alex's leg is kind of like schrodinger's war wound in the show; it pops up for plot points but is conveniently forgotten when he needs to sprint, or fuck, or drive, or shower, or walk quickly, or inhabit a cabin in the middle of nowhere that's definitely not laid out for someone missing a limb. you get my meaning. it's messy & i hate it. 
> 
> i'm happy to utterly ignore the plot of this show & instead just dig around inside the relationship between these two. 
> 
> i'm leescoresbies.tumblr.com - let me know if you liked it or drop me a comment xo


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